Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You By Sally Rooney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, revolves around a quartet of young people: Eileen, a dutiful grind who works for a literary magazine, Felix, a wee thing who works a drone job in a warehouse, Simon, a suave exterior on a messy interior, and most especially Alice, who’s living on the proceeds of a successful novel she published a little while before the beginning of Beautiful World, Where Are You.

On a whim shortly after meeting him, Alice takes Felix to Rome so they can live together. Back in drab, one-dimensional old Dublin, an unhappy-in-love Eileen begins to force herself to have romantic feelings for Simon, even though she’s known him as part of her unseen emotional wallpaper for most of her life. The novel follows these plot lines in much the same way as one boils noodles: semi-attentively, disinterestedly, and with a limp, flavorless result.

The narrative gimmick on which Rooney hangs much of the book is as poorly-conceived as it is poorly-executed: for much of its length, this is an epistolary novel. Alice and Eileen send each other completely unbelievable emails, emails of enormous length and complexity, emails, in other words, that know they’re in a novel. Through these chapter-length emails, they keep each other apprised of the gummy metronome-tick of their love lives, all of it rendered in Rooney’s, shall we say, distinctive prose:

Like the way I didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty and it was so painful and awkward and bad, and since then I’ve always felt like exactly the kind of person that would happen to, even though before then I didn’t. And now I just feel like the kind of person whose life partner would fall out of love with them after several years, and I can’t find a way not to be that kind of person anymore.

Rooney’s book Normal People elicited paeans of hysterically overheated praise from every single last nook of the allegedly critical word. It was called elegant, witty, great, and transformative, even though it was flat, drab, dumb, and derivative. It catapulted Rooney to the top of the literary world, making her the most famous, most imitated, and most lauded novelist in the world, despite the fact that she’s conspicuously talentless. 

That disparity is sounded as a tinny note of snide self-absorption throughout Beautiful World, Where Are You, in which readers are told about Alice’s breakout book that “a lot of press attention surrounded the publication, mostly positive at first, and then some negative pieces reacting to the fawning positivity of the initial coverage.” When she first submitted the book, Alice confesses, she just wanted to make enough money to finish the next book. “I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person,” she whines, “capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing.” 

It’s a whine she’s shared with Eileen, who’s duty-bound to cant it back:

If you find it cathartic to write me histrionic messages about the publishing world where you say everyone you know is bloodthirsty and wants to kill you or fuck you to death, but all means continue to write them. No doubt you have met evil people through your work, though I suspect you’ve met a lot of boring, ethically average people as well.

That’s fairly clear, at any rate, though repulsively self-pitying: Alice the millionaire-phenom author feels victimized by all the bloodthirsty, unethical people in the publishing world, let alone all those grubby readers out there, nosing around in her personality and upbringing. If we extrapolate anything of the author into the character, it at least adds a seasoning of bathos to this soup of boredom. 

But the boredom still wins out. The plot in Beautiful World, Where Are You is not sloppy and meandering as some kind of meta-commentary on the shapelessness of modern twenty-something existence - it’s sloppy and meandering because Sally Rooney is incapable of writing anything more coherent. The characters in Beautiful World, Where Are You are not vapid and one-dimensional as some kind of meta-commentary on personality in the age of social media - they’re vapid and one-dimensional because Sally Rooney is incapable of writing fleshed-out characters. The prose in Beautiful World, Where Are You is not weak as some kind of meta-commentary on the flat affect of instant messaging - it’s weak because Sally Rooney is incapable of writing anything better. The inevitable success - and renewed round of hysterical over-praise - that will greet Beautiful World, Where Are You continues one of the most notable literary charades of the 21st century: a studiously dull writer wildly succeeding solely due to least-common-denominator bandwagon-jumping. We probably won’t need to wait more than a year for the Hulu adaptation.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.